Change SharePoint Online root site collection to use the new “Communication Site Template”

My tenant just got the new Communication site template. Thank you @SharePoint

UPDATE! After a lot of waiting and failures with the “Enable-SPOComsite” cmdlet, today i tried the new siteswap “Invoke-SPOSiteSwap” and this is working pretty great, the good part is that if you have built a comsite as a landing page you don’t need to rebuild it. the down part is that in the backend it seems the root site still report back as a classic site, i presume this is in place to make redirections works. Anyways pretty happy with the SiteSwap. 😉

UPDATE! GREAT NEWS MS just release news this week at MS Ignite 2018, they will native support the conversion of the #rootsite to #comsite with a dedicated PowerShell cmdlet, release date soon. which means we don’t need to hack it anymore, stay tuned for release announcement in your tenant 🙂

As I’ve built numerous Intranet sites both with SharePoint On-premises and SharePoint Online, I want to see if I can use the new template on the root team site.

Because the root SPO site is a team site, it turn out no matter what I did I cannot get rid of the left NAV bar, even though I’ve got all the new webparts and layouts.

Until Microsoft release a means to change this, my work around is as follows, remember that this works best for new customer or customer with an empty root SPO site, existing customer need to plan a migration of content.

First, create a new site using the Communication Template

Navigate to the “Save site as a template” page, this page is hidden from the menu so use the following URL

76 thoughts on “Change SharePoint Online root site collection to use the new “Communication Site Template””

Have you had any feedback from Microsoft, or other developers, on this? I’ve come across quite a few people who wished that the root site collection could be converted to a Communication Site, but no one suggested the solution you describe here. Have you encountered any issues since publishing this?

Hi, haven’t heard anything from MS yet, as far as I can see, haven’t encountered any problems yet. It’s a standard site collection with a template, so i presume it should be fine, unless MS does something weird in the backend.

Do you have any idea how to get a statement from the Office team or someone else at Microsoft about this? I already posted a query about this to the Communication Sites AMA without getting a response. I’ll try on Thursday when I go to the Seattle area Office 365 Meetup at the Microsoft campus, but the presenters this time are not ones who would have any responsibility for this.

I’d decided since my last posting to go ahead and make a Communication site the root site, so this is frustrating. Of course, I can create a Communication site and treat it as the central site, but then I’ve got this other site, the default root with the best URL, that isn’t doing anything. In fact, I’ll have to ask the sys admin to redirect away from it.

Hi Joseph, i totally agree with you, that’s why I’ve created this post, totally waste to have the root URL do nothing, and in the back it’s just a customized site template, the only difference is that now Microsoft is doing the customization and not some random SP developer.

Hi Jimmy –
I need the template but am running into the same error w/ page not available. Could you share the template with me? I can’t access it using the link provided. Do I need permissions to your onedrive? Thanks,

I spoke briefly with Mark Kashman (Microsoft Product Manager) at a Seattle Office 365 meetup Thursday, and he suggested simply creating a modern page in the default root site collection to get the Communication Site functionality. I’ve since confirmed that this is indeed possible; the page is a modern page with all the same features, including sections, News, Events, Hero, etc as are available for a Communication Site page.

I’m curious to know if you think this would meet the use case requirements.

The major difference I’m aware of is the that navigation is on the left side (not the top as with Communication sites). And given reliance on left-side navigation a page-spanning banner/hero would not make sense. The hero web part is available, but it does not displace the navigation. In effect, there is a two-column format for the page with a very narrow left column reserved for navigation. Is this what you mean when you say that “we don’t get the full page width layout”? I’m not sure that I consider this important for an intranet or central hub home page. Can you tell me why you do?

I can see that clients would prefer top navigation and full page width; I would too. But I gather from other comments here that MS is not permitting root site replacement with a Communication Site (too bad!). For my agency, using a modern page won’t be a deal-breaker, but I’ll be watching to see if MS relents.

I don’t know if this is still the case, but 1-2 years ago, I heard that using the “Save site as template” was not appropriate anymore because it freezes the definition of the site. Improvements made by Office 365 over time are not applied on sites deployed this way. This is why new provisioning models such as PnP deploys all the artefacts through the API. Since Communication sites are clearly in its infancy, it seems risky to me to freeze its feature set so early!

Hi Francis, not sure about what you are referring too here, as I understand a site definition and a site template is two different thing, a site definition is something created using custom code, that’s why it’s “unsafe” while site template use standard stuff supported by Microsoft. Well unless microsoft removes the base template SITEPAGEPUBLISHING#0 from O365, if this happens then all #comsites in O365 will go down..that will be pretty bad.

I received the same Access Denied error following the above tutorial but I got this to work by creating a site using PowerShell.

“New-SPOSite -Title “your title””

I then got asked for the url/owner/storage quota. Hit Return.

Once created, I then uploaded the template from Jimmy (above) and uploaded that to the solutions gallery. Activated the solution then went back to new site homepage and then selected the new coms template and voila!

Hi Mark, happy to know that you’re considering my professional services, but Microsoft is actively blocking us,m from using this workaround in new tenants, I’ll recommend you to wait til after #MSIgnite later this month, hopefully we’ll get some news regarding this.

Same issue for me. All steps above work perfectly fine, until I’m trying to select the uploaded template from the custom tab. I know that this has been announced, but the workaround seems to be out of order.

I am building a SP intranet for a BU of 80 people and I planned to use the communication site template as a ‘landingspage’ as a quick fix, as it serves our needs and to avoid from writing code (I am a newbie to SP and don’t write code, they made me responsible for this project because I’m young and ‘good with technology’)

Reading in the comments, I understand that it does not work anymore. In your last comment you state ‘pefully we might don’t need to apply this hack anymore’. Do you have any updates on that? Are you referring to the ‘hub site’, and when can we be expecting this?

Hi Koen, “Hub sites” is the right direction yes, but I’m not sure if we can replace the root SC with a hub site yet. The roadmap info says it’s Q1-Q2 2018. I’m trying another fix, maybe it works, if yes I’ll update the post…. 😉

I succesfully appied this workaround and created a Communication site on the root of my SharePoint Online tenant. As others, I’ve experienced the issue with the top navigation on my Communication site. People that didn’t use this workaround also experienced this issue. But as announced, MS fixed it!!

But my Communication site created on the root still has this issue. When I create a new Communication site using the UI without any workaround (so under the sites managed path) the issue is not there anymore. So this workaround has the negative side-effect that updates (to comm site on root) are not applied. Better not use this.

Hi Bastiaan, thanks for the feedback, not sure about the top navigation issue you’re having as I’m not using that feature. But I can confirm that the regular navigation in #comsite to other sites is not broken, all elements works as expected, all my sites are modern sites, either Team or Com site.

I got a Communication Site to load under my primary tenant (thank you). However, the search function at the top seems to be completely broken. Not sure if the template export/import accounts for mapping that search bar to the right place. My end goal is to have a modern communication site that can search *all* of my tenant sharepoint content by default.

Hi Jeremy as far as I the search box that we see is by default like that, the default place i’ve seen with a search scope all is probably the SharePoint home page or classic search center, drop me an email and maybe we can work it out, cheers

To me it feels like Site-Designs and Site-Scripts are the way to go here – maybe this was the end goal for Microsoft to allow people to create Communication sites based on that same template. Reading the following guide it seems appropriate to me – I just need to confirm the correct TemplateID for a communication site:

I just followed this solution and it worked great. Few gotchas for me was using powershell set the denyaddandcustomepage 0 flag on the site I was trying to save the template from AND on the root once it was recreated. I kept getting an Access Denied error until I set that flag on the root site.

A simple alternative is to a redirect on the root site to the communication site. The best redirect would be a ‘link to a document’ linking to that comm site homepage. This on you set as the default homepage of the root. Eh voila.

I have a classic root in a government space that cannot be changed. I can build communication site collections off that root. So “https://******.sharepoint.com/sites/home” is created as a communication site and much more attractive than building a modern page off the root of a classic site. But now I want the classic to be the root at “https://******.sharepoint.com” without latency on the redirect.

I have a classic root in a government space that cannot be changed. I can build communication site collections off that root. So “https://******.sharepoint.com/sites/home” is created as a communication site and much more attractive than building a modern page off the root of a classic site. But now I want the communication site to be the root at “https://******.sharepoint.com” without latency on the redirect.

Hi Mate, MS just released news this week at Ignite 2018 that they will support native converting of root site to #Comsite, we don’t need to use this workaround in the future. Watch our for release announcement in your tenant. “Soon… was all they said”.

This approach is not working anymore, first time i tried to setup root site as CommSite, i couldent get “Custom” tab for selecting a template, as evtrifonov describes…And on second attempt to create CommSite iam getting error when i try to upload .wsp with custom template to Solution Gallery, i dont have permission, even iam tenant global admin, tried different ways, getting same error…

Microsoft will release new powershell commands for creating CommSite on root, but when? its almost 14 days left of 2018….do we need to wait untinl the last day of month?

I tried this yesterday. (Jan 5, 2018) I had two issues: First, it took a very long time to delete and create the root site. I was getting the following message: “We’re still working on it and it might take 24 hours” It finally did get created though. I think I should have ensured that the site finished getting deleted from the recycle bin before creating it. The next issue was that I am getting “Access Denied” when trying to navigate to _layouts/15/savetmpl.aspx. Fortunately, I was able to download a .wsp from another tenant and use it to create the root site. Hopefully, MS releases the PowerShell command soon. Thank you for your post!

Enable-CommSite is not even on the Roadmap, so the likelihood that we’re getting this any time soon is doubtful. I contacted Microsoft Support last month and showed them the Ignite video of it being executed. They have no documentation on it and, after two weeks of escalations, their response was pretty much “we don’t know”.

Thanks for the .wsp, I’ve been unable to export the comms site as a template, getting an unspecified error, but have been able to create a modern hub (root) communications site with your template. Cheers!

Caution
It is not supported to delete or replace existing site collection from the root URL of your tenant. You should not in any circumstances delete the root site collection. Technically this can be performed using APIs, but that can cause the tenant to move into inconsistent status.

Followed this again (have done it several times) and ran into an error when trying to create from the newly created & uploaded comm site template.”manifest.xml not found”.
Trying again with Jimmy’s template (linked above) worked fine. So either the saving site as template trick has been blocked by MS by removing the manifest file in the wsp, or it was just a glitch on this occasion.